This is the first issue of The Left Fold, a weekly programming article digest.

I hope to make it easier to keep up with the news and learn about the practice
of programming without having to wade through the fluff common on social news
sites. If you write or find an article interesting to a wide audience of
programmers, let me know. Feedback is
solicited on the format, content, and frequency.

InformIT has two articles on the fifteenth anniversary of Design Patterns:

In Python news, Guido proposed a moratorium on language syntax and semantics
changes for several years in order to further acceptance of Python 3.x. He
hopes the opportunity will be taken to port libraries to 3.x and improve the
standard library and implementations:

In other Python news, the much-maligned Global Interpreter Lock is getting
reworked. It's not going away, but multi-threaded performance is expected to
improve without degrading the single-threaded case. Here's how:

A small roundup of tools to eliminate wasted space in your C/C++/C# structs.
Unfortunately, they don't go further and help you lay the structs out
optimally; I've seen a nifty Common Lisp macro that does just that.

Factor, a dynamic language, has added more support for typed functions to help
with compiler optimizations. This article shows how little intrusion is
required to convert your dynamic code to typed code and what the compiler can
do with that information:

Memcached released a report card showing metrics on time between releases, time
to fix bugs of varying severities. The first step towards improving anything
is measuring it, and this shows a few nice ways to measure progress.